40
“You didn’t clock in, I hope,” said Romanski as Reno eased into the shadowy laboratory, closing the door with care so as not to make noise.
“Hell no,” said Reno, slipping off his pack and setting it down. He snagged a lab coat off a hook and threw it on over his T-shirt, covering up his tattooed arms. He pulled on a pair of nitrile gloves and face mask. No hairnet, Romanski noted—Reno had no hair so he didn’t need one, he supposed, but it still was against protocol. Fuck protocol; Reno was doing him a solid.
Fully gowned now, he came over. “So where are we?”
“Still waiting for the alignment program to finish,” Romanski said.
It was three o’clock in the morning, and Romanski had been working off the clock since eleven, sequencing the DNA of the little brown square that now sat in a sealed vial back in the lab safe. That chip was supposed to be nothing less than a fragment of bone from the head of Saint John the Baptist.
Romanski had run the PCR amplification process earlier that evening, then through the genome assembler, and he was now waiting for the computer to finish analyzing the results. He’d asked Reno in because he was a savant when it came to reading genome sequences.
“I guess I’m Catholic,” said Reno. “Even if I can’t work up the nerve to go to confession. But this worship of the body parts of dead saints feels primitive to me. Someone once said there are enough bones of Saint Peter in all his so-called reliquaries to reassemble three cows.”
“If this one’s also from a cow, we’ll find out in a moment.”
“The things we do for Frankie Cash,” said Reno. “I mean, what exactly are we supposed to be looking for?”
“Cash was kind of vague about that.”
“And why off the clock?”
“It’s like this,” Romanski said. “You know our victim, Castillo, went to Rome, broke into a church, and stole a piece of bone from a reliquary supposedly containing the head of Saint John the Baptist?”
“Yeah. That’s some crazy shit.”
“Cash said he did it to analyze its DNA. Cash asked Holmes for authorization, but Holmes nixed it. There’s some priest here from the Vatican who wants the sacred head bone back, and Holmes was worried there’d be a scandal if we messed with it. So Cash asked me to sequence the DNA on the Q.T.”
“So what kind of analysis did you do?”
“Since it’s supposed to be human and male, I figured I’d run an analysis on a bunch of well-known SNPs on the Y chromosome. Of course, if it’s a bone from a female cow, we’ll get some wild results.”
The computer program halted with ading!
“Avon calling!” said Romanski.
“Oh boy,” said Reno, sitting down at the workstation and rubbing his hands together, then waggling his fingers. “Let’s have a look.” He began to type.
Romanski watched him work. This part of the process was recent, an innovation since he had graduated from CU forensics, and it was one he’d never mastered. Reno, on the other hand, had devoured the four-hundred-page digital use manual to the GeneMapp software like it was a Dan Brown novel. The PCR machine had amplified the DNA a millionfold, then the strands had been fed through a nanopore reader and the sequences recorded. That was fed into the computer to be aligned and compared against a known human genome sequence. The program then spit out the differences, or variants—a far more accurate mapping than gel electrophoresis. It was now Reno’s job to examine the variants and figure out what they meant.
As Reno paged through the screens, one at a time, he issued little grunts and whistles. Romanski listened to this for a while and began to get a little irritated.
“So—is it human or cow?” he asked sarcastically.
Reno didn’t answer immediately. He paged through a few more sets of numbers and graphs, ran a few quick programs, and then he sat back in his chair, looked at Romanski, and issued a loud sigh.
“That doesn’t sound good,” said Romanski.
“It ain’t cow,” said Reno. “It’s partly a human male and a whole lot something else.”
“Like what?”
“It’s hard to say without running it through a bunch of DNA databases looking for matches, which would take days. Which is a waste, because I already know what the problem is.”
“What?” Romanski asked.
“We—or ratheryou—fucked up. The sample was contaminated.”
